Wind power is considered one of the cleanest, most environmentally friendly energy sources presently available, and wind turbines have gained increased attention in this regard. A modern wind turbine typically includes a tower, generator, gearbox, nacelle, and one or more rotor blades. The rotor blades capture kinetic energy of wind using known airfoil principles. For example, rotor blades typically have the cross-sectional profile of an airfoil such that, during operation, air flows over the blade producing a pressure difference between the sides. Consequently, a lift force, which is directed from a pressure side towards a suction side, acts on the blade. The lift force generates torque on the main rotor shaft, which is geared to a generator for producing electricity.
More specifically, some wind turbines, such as wind-driven doubly-fed induction generator (DFIG) systems or full power conversion systems, include a power converter, e.g. with an AC-DC-AC topology. Standard power converters typically include a bridge circuit, a power filter and optionally a crowbar circuit. In addition, the bridge circuit typically includes a plurality of cells, for example, one or more power switching elements and/or one or more diodes.
Such wind turbines can experience costly down time whenever a power converter, or other electrical components, experiences a trip fault. Investigating the cause of the various trips can be time consuming and may require offsite or onsite root cause analysis. Known power converters typically categorize all trips into four broad groups, including for example, voltage, current, thermal, and other, and then distinguish each of the four categories by either the line-side power converter or the rotor-side power converter, creating a total of eight categories. Such category bits are then communicated to the supervisory turbine control. This broad converter trip categorization system, however, has proven unsuitable for providing customers and service personnel with enough detail to understand what type of service the converter might need. Further, present categorization systems fail to allow the proper counters in the turbine controller to be incremented in an attempt to maintain a historical record of the causes of turbine down-time.
Accordingly, a system and method that provides a more resolved categorization of converter trips in the power converter of the wind turbine would be advantageous. More specifically, a system and method that better pinpoints the type of trip that caused the turbine to go off line would be welcomed in the art. Thus, the present disclosure is directed to an improved system and method for categorizing trip faults of a power converter of a wind turbine that address the aforementioned issues.